Office Hours

Teaching

Research Focus Areas

Anthropology of the Built Environment

Mobilities

Remote Areas

Climate Change

Indigenous Movements

Cultures and Identities

History of Anthropology

Arctic and Subarctic

former Soviet Union

Short Biography

Peter Schweitzer was born in Upper Austria and studied Philosophy, Political Science and Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Vienna. After completing his PhD dissertation on the Ethnohistory of Northeastern Siberia in 1990, he joined the Department of Anthropology at the University of Alaska of Fairbanks in 1991. Having risen from Assistant Professor to Full Professor by the early 2000s, Schweitzer eventually became Alaska Director of the Experimental Program to Simulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR). In late 2012, he returned to his alma mater and accepted a position of Full Professor at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology (IKSA) at the University of Vienna, while retaining an appointment as Professor Emeritus at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. Since October 2016, he is head of department at IKSA in Vienna.

Schweitzer is past president of the International Arctic Social Sciences Association, and past chair of the Social and Human Sciences Working Group of the International Arctic Science Committee (IASC). He currently serves as the speaker of the Working Group History of Anthropology of the German Anthropological Association, serves on scientific advisory boards of major projects in Sweden and Russia, and serves on the (advisory) editorial boards of professional journals in Germany, Estonia, Russia and New Zealand.